ABSTRACT
Full-field measurement techniques and especially, Infrared (IR) thermography are appropriate techniques to detect the heat sources produced by the material itself during the deformation
1 INTRODUCTION
It is well-known that Natural Rubber (NR) has excellent mechanical properties (i.e. high elasticity, high damping, high elongation at failure, etc) which are widely used in many fields, such as mechanical, automotive and aerospace engineering. However, this type of material is subjected to numerous physical mechanisms during the deformation process which are still not clearly understood and feed the scientific debate: Mullins effect (Mullins 1948, Chagnon, Verron, Gornet, Marckmann, & Charrier 2004), cavitation (Stringfellow & Abeyaratne 1989, Le Cam & Toussaint 2008), strain induced crystallization
process from measured temperature variations. This technique has been widely applied to metals, polymers and composite materials (see for instance (Chrysochoos & Louche 2000, Chrysochoos & Louche 2001)), but rarely to elastomeric materials (Pottier, Moutrille, Le Cam, Balandraud, & Gre´diac 2009, Toussaint, Balandraud, Le Cam, & Grédiac 2012). In this work we are mainly interested in the analysis of the temperature variations obtained by IR thermography during the deformation processes of unfilled natural rubber, in order to characterize the thermal response of such crystallizable rubber under homogeneous cyclic uniaxial tensile test, at ambient temperature.
